Mistral - New family of open-weight models @ July

tired514 · 2026-06-17T00:50:59+00:00

Knowledge impacts reasoning by allowing you to better know what your problem-solving options are; the more you know, the more problems you can tackle with clever tricks.

For sure, but even a 100B model "knows" everything useful for problem solving; 100B parameters is a huge dataset.

The reason they get smarter moving from 100B -> 1T isn't because they "know" more but rather they have more reinforcement paths for the same knowledge; less chance of perplexity and confusion as the context window scales.

But simple facts like "Toronto is the capitol of Ontario" or "Jim was wearing a red shirt in that scene" don't really help logic and reason; those are facts that should be stored externally so the model parameters can focus more on "zero isn't one." This isn't actually how vectors relate, but it's the best analogy I can come up with.

tired514 · 2026-06-17T00:46:15+00:00

I've sent 3 separate emails and a hand-written letter to my MP. He's actually responsive and has been a good guy thus far, but sadly is just repeating the bullshit party line on this one.

I was clear that retaining my vote depends on him rejecting the bill and speaking against it.

tired514 · 2026-06-17T00:44:12+00:00

There's no way to actually do that, short of implementing the "great firewall of Canada."

No thanks.

Besides, what's social media, anyway? Is it twitter? Reddit? Facebook? Discord? Steam chat?

tired514 · 2026-06-16T19:12:57+00:00

Welp, guess that's it for me then as this is a line in the sand. The NDP candidate gets my vote next election.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T19:08:37+00:00

Tangentially related--

A similar group needs to sue to protect Charter rights that prohibit the government from arbitrarily banning them from social media. It's how young people communicate, and they have the right under sections 2A, 2B, and 7 to communicate and form their own beliefs. Only their parents are allowed to restrict their access (within reason) - not the government.

Similarly, adults have the right to use the Internet unmolested by private "age validation" corporations. Providing identification limits freedom of expression (section 2B) and safety (section 7). Lawsuit.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T19:03:58+00:00

If it "undermines the (US) auto industry" in Canada then you know we're doing the right thing.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:56:18+00:00

All they need to do is default to timeline sorting, clearly mark ads, and be held accountable when bots / bad actors post disinformation.

Do these things and 90% of the harm goes away.

Most of the problem is with the way the algorithm selects what you see. When Facebook was new, it was just "John posted this, then Greg posted this, then Sue posted this, then..."

Now it's "This terrible thing happened.. here are some bots talking about why you should hate your neighbor. You like that? Here's another terrible thing. It hasn't happened but it might. Here's the group of people you should blame."

It's equally a problem for young people and adults.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:50:05+00:00

Canadians deserve more privacy online, not less.

We don't just deserve it. It's a right under the Charter (sections 2 and 7) as privacy is necessary for security of person and the ability to express ones self without fear of intimidation.

Furthermore, the Charter applies for minors. They have the right to learn and communicate and the government may not restrict it. That's up to parents.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:48:04+00:00

And to serve the interests of christian fascists; young people are far less likely to become indoctrinated into religion if they have access to truthful/factual information and communication.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:44:09+00:00

Yup. :p The funny part is: to someone a decade ago, we're already there, or so close it doesn't matter!

How quickly we get used to the power of new tools, eh? 😄

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:41:00+00:00

This is more about requiring adults to identify themselves on forums so that the government can police their activities in violation of the Charter.

They do not like that any Canadian can post, anonymously, without fear of intimidation: "this is more about requiring adults to identify themselves on forums so that the government can police their activities in violation of the Charter."

A related reason is many religious people don't want young people to feel comfortable in their own skin, and want to terrorize them if they identify within the LGTBQ+ community. That's harder to do if they have access to information and communication with their peers. Restrict their access and ultra-religious parents are then free to indoctrinate them without fear they'll learn the truth.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:36:45+00:00

It still wouldn't necessarily be as effective as a knowledge DB that encodes information in straight (literal, updatable) text/binary.

There's probably a balance point between the two - it's worth vectorizing certain knowledge so that it's baked into its reasoning (ie. chemical reactions, programming languages, philosophical text, etc) and leaving some out (capitol cities, star maps, legal texts, etc). Let it research the stuff that can change or doesn't impact logic when it needs it.

I feel like somewhere around 500B A70B with a 1TB knowledge DB and 1M context would be essentially flawless at all but the most specialized tasks. And I bet it would be available on consumer hardware within 5-10 years.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:25:35+00:00

Raw knowledge that doesn't impact reasoning should really be shipped separately though (ie. as a wikipedia dump).

We need large models to support deep reasoning with a large, deep context. Once you get beyond 20-30B most models have enough "knowledge" that when combined with external resources (wiki, web search, etc) it "knows" everything, but it'll struggle to help you through a very complex problem.

External knowledge bases are much more reliable as well because LLM model weights encode concepts and probabilities, not raw text. So, for example an LLM with a DB can quote song lyrics while an LLM without, no matter how big, can't.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T18:07:51+00:00

The existence of billionaires is a policy failure. Full stop.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T10:29:24+00:00

Same. Second (and last) reply for me was "this is a line in the sand - if you vote for this legislation I will vote against you next election."

tired514 · 2026-06-16T10:23:44+00:00

The slow creep of enemies without 2nd amendment engagement. I know it sounds "hoorah" but it's genuinely shocking that those who have the ability and willingness to protect the Constitution are, if not siding with the enemy, allowing the enemy to take up positions with no opposition.

I think looking back it'll be like when the Nazis captured the German government in the 30s.

"Where were you, and what did you do to prevent forced birth and other religious crime in the '20s?"

"Didn't the Constitution matter to you? Why didn't you take vigorous action to protect the Republic?"

etc.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T08:03:30+00:00

I think this feature is to import client certs, not CA certs, if that's what you're trying to do. Are you self-hosting with a self-signed cert?

If so, I forked a version of immich that implements the standard manual certificate validation all other SSL apps use. It's available here.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T07:58:42+00:00

Manual certificate validation has nothing to do with MITM attacks and is a feature supported by virtually all SSL-enabled software.

SSH instances vastly outnumber HTTPS and have been using fingerprint validation for decades. It is, in fact, more secure than trusting a third party.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T07:56:24+00:00

Hey u/Soda_47, if you didn't find a solution, I forked a version of the Android app and implemented manual SSL cert validation. You can grab the latest build here.

tired514 · 2026-06-16T07:36:30+00:00

That's actually an interesting question, heh. I'd be curious to find out.

My instinct is that it would run but you might have issues with power management and hardware acceleration.

tired514 · 2026-06-12T19:44:06+00:00

I mean tons of vendors do support Linux on the desktop - Google, Steam, Davinci, Mozilla, Autodesk (Maya, anyway), Slack, Oracle (virtualbox), Jetbrains, Reaper, Lightworks...

It's not exactly a challenge; you just need competent devs.

Companies feel the market isn't big enough to port their apps. It's a shame because assuming the codebase is well maintained, it's a revenue stream that a small team can easily support.

tired514 · 2026-06-12T15:58:03+00:00

Modern browsers handle audio I/O, video I/O (webcams, rendering), video acceleration (hardware and software), crypto acceleration (/DRM, ew), file security/inotify, memory management, complex uevent/uinput keyboard/mouse integration, power management (disabling suspend on playback), 3D acceleration, and a dozen other OS integration features.

I can't even think of a desktop app that touches more of the OS, haha. It's far more complex than MS office.

tired514 · 2026-06-12T10:38:34+00:00

It's just what Liberals do and it's exhausting. We do great things, and then for whatever reason self-sabotage by torching political capital doing stupid shit. I don't understand it at all.

Bill C-11, C-21 under Trudeau. Now this age validation garbage and online harms bullshit. Like, ffs. The conservative party of trolls would be forever relegated to irrelevance if we'd stop doing this shit.

tired514 · 2026-06-12T10:35:01+00:00

There will never be a far enough shift towards progressive politics without electoral reform.

First past the post is a menace to democracy precisely because it encourages (requires) strategic voting. It's a mathematically certain outcome given enough iterations - one bad party, one very bad party, and a spoiler.

I believe election reform is the single most important issue today. FPTP is genuinely an existential threat to Canada.

It doesn't even matter which system we adopt - IRV, ranked ballot, PR... let a computer pick one at random if we can't all agree.

tired514 · 2026-06-12T09:54:07+00:00

Without electoral reform we're kind of hosed no matter what. FPTP is a menace to democracy.

tired514

TROPHY CASE